In 2019, in an effort to improve the efficiency and sustainability of its programming, GAIN’s Workforce Nutrition Programme (WFN) shifted away from the traditional project development and evaluation cycle towards a nimbler "Quality Improvement" (QI) approach.
Limited access to markets and poor market infrastructure are underlying factors that negatively impact nutrition outcomes for the rural poor in hard-to-reach areas, including communities working on tea estates in India. An innovative and sustainable market-based supply chain model was tested in Assam, India, to improve the nutrition of the tea estate communities.
Healthy diets are unaffordable to over 2 billion people worldwide and food access remains a challenge for many. The food environment illustrates the interaction of consumers with different food retail outlets to acquire and consume food.
As elaborated in a GAIN evidence brief, poor-quality diets and insufficient food quantity are linked to reduced work capacity. This suggests that the malnutrition burden can be partly addressed through a win-win-win approach which improves individual lives, business outcomes, and national economies.
Diet quality in India is characterized by overall inadequate dietary diversity, despite high rates of consumption of vegetables, animal-source foods (mostly dairy), and whole grains. Action is needed to reduce reliance on starchy staples, to increase consumption of fruits, nuts and seeds in particular, and to moderate intakes of sweet foods and drinks, and packaged salty snacks.
GAIN’s Workforce Nutrition program conceived and implemented a market-based supply chain solution to enhance the food environment around tea estates by leveraging the existing neighbourhood line shops to improve access to healthy foods.
GAIN, Unilever, and the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH) saw an opportunity to improve the nutrition and health of farmers, workers, and their families in supply chains, whilst working to increase supplier and worker satisfaction, productivity and brand loyalty.
India’s delivery of a pathway document for food systems transformation, in advance of the first United Nations Food Systems Summit in 2021, is evidence of a political commitment to transformative food systems action.
The Commercialisation of Biofortified Crops (CBC) Programme was launched in 2019 to address widespread hidden hunger in Africa and Asia by significantly expanding the reach of foods and food products made with biofortified staple crops.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a multiplier of vulnerability, compounding threats to food security and nutrition (FSN) while exposing weaknesses in food systems. In response, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) developed the Keeping Food Markets Working (KFMW) programme to provide targeted support to help sustain core food systems.
